Death penalty: 18 is old enough

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It’s been five years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executions of juveniles — youths who were under 18 when they committed capital murder — violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. As the 5-4 majority put it, “evolving standards of decency” forbid putting to death someone who has not lived long enough to gain “a mature understanding of his own humanity.”

The California Supreme Court was recently asked to extend the prohibition to 18-year-olds, particularly one who, according to his lawyer, was immature and mentally disturbed. Last week the court said no, unanimously.

The defendant, Richard Gamache, enlisted in the Army in 1992, at 18, and was discharged for psychiatric reasons a few months later. Back home in the San Bernardino County town of Yermo, he cooked up a plot with his wife and a friend to rob a neighbor couple, Lee and Peggy Williams.

When the three were done looting the couple’s house at gunpoint and were about to drive off in their motor home and car, according to prosecution witnesses, Gamache made the Williamses lie on the ground, told them, “Thank you and have a nice day,” and shot both of them in the head. Lee Williams died, but his wife survived and called police.

One issue that Gamache’s lawyer raised in appealing his death sentence was an argument that, if it’s cruel and unusual punishment to execute a 17-year-old murderer, it’s just as cruel and unusual to execute someone whose mental age was that of a juvenile, even if he was 11 months past his 18th birthday when he fired the fatal shot.

Attorney Jay Moller said in his brief to the court, “An 18-year-old, mentally ill teenager does not deserve to die at the hands of the state, regardless of the crimes he has committed.” He also argued that executing anyone under 21 violates “fundamental notions of justice.”

The court saw it differently. Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has drawn a line at 18, the point at which society, for many purposes, divides childhood from adulthood. The high court identified an “emergent national consensus” against executing anyone who committed a murder before turning 18, Werdegar said, and the standard is no different in California.

Moller said he’s disappointed, but he’s still optimistic that Gamache, now 36 — who Moller said has been treated with anti-psychotic drugs since arriving on Death Row — will eventually get his death sentence overturned in federal court.